Voluntary Income Tax Assistance Essay

Volunteer Income Tax Assistance is a program that offers help on taxation matters to the less privileged such as persons living with disabilities, people making less than 54,000 dollars and the elderly. The illiterate are also beneficiaries of this program as they need to be assisted in filing their tax returns. Volunteers who are IRS-certified are brought on board to provide the necessary return preparation on returns electronically. Social places such as the community centers, schools, and convenient locations are used as sites for offering this assistance. This submission will be describing my experience as a volunteer at the Voluntary Income Tax Assistance and the recommendations that I would issue to the program runners.

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While I worked as a volunteer at the Volunteer Income Tax Assistance, I would say that the experience was a milestone of experience in my life. The values and skills that I acquired are unequaled to any other I have ever experienced in my lifetime. As a volunteer, the experience is a Connecticut that helped me view the world differently and saw the larger picture. For the time I worked as a volunteer, I have learned that as I work, others are monitoring my progress as I am not perfect all the time. The site manager would come around at our desks and instructed us to finish filing returns in a record time of six minutes. This supervision thus increased my self-confidence such that I could complete my work on the expected timeline. A safe learning environment was created for us in the process of the supervision as well.

As a volunteer at the Voluntary Income Tax Assistance, the experience I got there helped me to have the urge to improve my professional skills in communication to a great extent. I could interact with people from every corner of the country, the site manager as well as my colleagues at work and get along well with them all. The fact that the clients represented vast walks of life, from the elderly, those with poor English proficiency as well as the persons living with disabilities, and get along well with each of them, I got the morale to polish my skills in communication and public relations. Some of the clients came by with varying moods, and we were supposed to give them a friendly approach.

I realized that behind every tax return, there was always a story. The Voluntary Income Tax Assistant program is based on a social platform. This means that the tax filing is about the social aspect of people's lives, which includes family and life. I developed the feeling of liking to meet people and listen to their experiences. I learned about the skill of balancing between talking and listening. I also did away with the habit of judging people by how I observed them be. I learned to form opinions about people after engaging them in a conversation and got to hear their part of the story, terming the working experience as a volunteer at VITA as incredible would be an understatement as a curious person. It was more than amazing.

Volunteering at VITA helped me to combine my power and mastery of accounting skills to make a difference. I would be very excited as I gave the necessary assistance in filing tax for the public. I, in turn, learned how to apply the tax skills that I had gained at school. This put me in a stalemate situation, a win-win kind of a scenario. I further realized how the American government provides services to the citizens. The look on clients' faces when advising them on the deductions to take or getting back was incredible.

Taking part in VITA program enabled me to develop my teamwork skills. I realized how working as a team makes work more comfortable and more enjoyable to do. The colleagues would show me where I went wrong and I too had my time to correct another. My teammates would also help me handle the uncooperative clients in the right manner. The program also improved my attitude to giving back to the community after I graduated. Giving back to the community gave me an honorable feeling that I would like to nurture later in life.

As a person who has volunteered at the Voluntary Income Tax Assistance, I have therefore had the first-hand experience of what happens and the necessary improvements that volunteers need to make for better service delivery. The most important thing to observe is maintaining a good impression on the clients. The first impression is mostly the only impression and therefore will have a lot to speak on your conduct. It is always proper etiquette that one introduces themselves jovially and makes the client understand the process to follow in filing the returns. A proper introduction will define how the clients later talk to you after that. A warm handshake is always a right way to welcome the client. It shows the level of friendliness that in place during the process.

I would also recommend that the government through the commissioners and the division in charge of wage investment should develop more efficient procedures and processes to ensure that the Voluntary Income Tax Assistance gains a broader coverage to cater for the populations that are often underserved. That could be achieved by the establishment of a baseline to provide for the communities that are underserved and whose data is available. (Reeves & Aaron, Pg 2) The Congress should oversee that the funds allocated for the specific coverage are appropriated accordingly to cater for the underserved people.

I would recommend that the volunteers working at the Voluntary Income Tax Assistance should at all times maintain professionalism at the job. Professionalism refers to the mode of dressing and the general conduct of a worker during the job timeline. Professionalism is essential as it helps keep off personal encounters while working on the returns of the respective clients (Nichols & Austin, Np). The worker should at all time portray utmost modesty during the working hours. In this way, conversations that tend to get personal are avoided to a great extent. Professionalism includes the presentation and the language used by the workers during working hours.

I would also wish to recommend that more user-friendly machines be brought on board to make the filing of returns easier and avoid frustrations that occur due to delays and software breakdowns. A week would hardly go by without having us getting massive frustrations from the computers we were using. The clients would sometimes get temperamental as most did not like the idea of sitting down and waiting for the long delays to get serviced. The shutdowns and delays made us look so incompetent or unmotivated to carry on our work. For this reason, I would highly recommend that the government through the commissioners look into this grievance and introduce more user-friendly machines and software systems.

Since the volunteers at the Voluntary Income Tax Assistance are new into the system of filing tax returns, I would recommend that they meet at regular intervals to form group discussions and discuss on how the work is taking on them. These group discussions would be held on a weekly basis like on Fridays. Some of the tax returns that volunteers file are strange to them and therefore need to discuss them and for what they were meant. By doing so, the volunteers sharpen their skills on different tax files that they would later encounter afterward. I also remember having to seek clarification at the end of the week on various tax file returns that I had no idea of what they were. This made me get familiar with most returns and increased my knowledge scope to a great extent.

Conclusion

I would also challenge that the volunteers embrace teamwork as it makes work more comfortable in a variety of ways like handling the uncooperative clients and helping each other where necessary in the process of filing. Collaboration gives everyone the moral to keep pressing on amid dull days and long working hours. Teamwork help improves one's public relation skills as well as one learns to get along well with others at the workplace. It is therefore essential that teamwork spirit is cherished and upheld during work.

Works Cited

Nichols, Austin, and Jesse Rothstein. The earned income tax credit (eitc). No. w21211. National Bureau of Economic Research, 2015.

Reeves, Aaron, et al. "Financing universal health coverage-effects of alternative tax structures on public health systems: cross-national modelling in 89 low-income and middle-income countries." The Lancet 386.9990 (2015): 274-280.